Crimea new focus of tension as Russia and Ukraine face off

Russian flag placed atop Crimean parliament by masked gunmen

A man shouts slogans as people wait in front of the Ukrainian parliament during a rally in Kiev on February 27, 2014. BULENT KILIC/AFP/Getty Images

Photograph by: BULENT KILIC/AFP/Getty Images
, Postmedia News

SIMFEROPOLl, Ukraine — Masked gunmen put a Russian tricolour atop the Crimean parliament after seizing the building overnight, adding another level of complexity for Ukraine’s acting government, which is to be sworn in Thursday.

Police and the pro-Russian crowd that gathered outside the parliament Thursday said they had no idea who had taken the action. But it appears very unlikely that they had any connection to the Russian government. The crowd believe that most of the rebels were from the heavily Russian port city of Sevastopol.

The rebels made no demands and said they would not negotiate with anyone.

Meanwhile, Russian news agencies report that ousted Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych has asked for, and been granted, protection by Russia. Yanukovych was quoted in a statement saying he still regards himself as Ukraine’s legitimate leader.

“I, Viktor Fedorovich Yanukovich appeal to the people of Ukraine,” his statement reads. “As before I still consider myself to be the lawful head of the Ukrainian state, chosen freely by the will of the Ukrainian people.

“Now it is becoming clear that the people in southeastern Ukraine and in Crimea do not accept the power vacuum and complete lawlessness in the country, when the heads of ministries are appointed by the mob.”

At the Crimean parliament, a light snow and drizzle fell while several hundred Russians shouted their encouragement to the rebels and screamed pro-Russian slogans and demanded that Crimea secede from Russia.

The seizure seemed to be connected to the abrupt interruption of a parliamentary debate Wednesday on Crimea separating from Ukraine by a group of Turkic-speaking Crimean Tatars.

In a bizarre irony, deputies picked their way through the rebel barricades to return to the parliament on Thursday, to again consider the question of Crimea’s future, while some of the gunmen “helped” oversee their work. Or so it seemed, although journalists were not allowed to check this for themselves.

“We have to make sure they vote the way we want them to,” said Oleg Sluzarenko, a former deputy, who addressed the protesters with a megaphone urging them not to go home.

Refat Chubarov, the Crimean Tatar leader, said Thursday that the Tatars hoped to establish civil defence units to work with local officials. Road blocks remained on the road from Simferopol to Sevastopol Thursday but they were smaller and far less aggressive than the had been on Wednesday. Sailors from the Russian base in Sevastopol were also less visible Thursday.

There were Russian news reports Thursday that Viktor Yanukovych, whose presidency ended after an explosion of violence in Kyiv last week, was reported to have left Sevastopol on a Russian ship and had taken sanctuary in Russia.

Yanukovych is wanted by the acting Ukrainian government for mass murder. It alleges that the deposed president was responsible for 82 deaths during last’s week revolt.

An armoured personnel carrier loomed beside a checkpoint controlling access to Sevastopol on Wednesday while other heavily armed vehicles moved into public places to guard Russia’s Black Sea fleet in the Crimean port, as Russian President Vladimir Putin further ratcheted up the pressure on Ukraine’s caretaker government.

Earlier, Russia placed 150,000 troops near the Ukrainian border on alert and ordered urgent exercises to test combat readiness. The snap exercise is scheduled to last four days. While it includes a large territory abutting eastern Ukraine, it does not involve Russian troops based closest to the Crimea.

The unprecedented moves — which included men wearing combat gear, ski masks and armed with assault rifles searching vehicles 40 kilometers north of Sevastopol — sent a clear signal to Kyiv and to the West of Russia’s determination to continue to defend what it regards as its interests, and the interests of Ukraine’s large Russian minority, in places such as the Crimea.

While obviously designed to intimidate Kyiv, what Putin was also doing was reassuring anxious ethnic Russians in Ukraine that they had not been abandoned.

Ukraine’s deepening political fault lines, and the potential for mayhem, were not only evident in Sevastopol and Moscow. They were on clear display Wednesday 100 kilometres to the north in Simferopol. Crimean Tatars loyal to Kyiv and chanting “allahu akbar” clashed with a group of Russian-Ukrainians who shouted their support for Moscow. A group of Tatars pushed their way past riot police and into the Crimean parliament where they succeeded in stopping debate on a motion to secede from Ukraine.

During the fierce jostling several protesters suffered bloody head wounds.

Russia’s actions came four days after a bloody coup by pro-European activists forced former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych to flee Kyiv. After 82 people died in bloody street fighting in the Ukrainian capital last week, there has been rising apprehension in areas with large Russian populations such as the Crimean peninsula.

Russia was “carefully watching what is happening in Crimea,” Putin’s defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, said on Wednesday.

Without elaborating on consequences, Washington warned the Kremlin over the weekend that it would be “a grave mistake” if it were to send troops into Crimea or other potential flashpoints such as the Donbass, where many Russians have been demanding that Moscow protect them from the new pro-western government being put together in Kyiv.

The Crimea is a particularly emotional subject. It had been part of Russia until Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev suddenly gave it to Ukraine in 1954 in what many in this country believe was a drunken stupor. Although the Crimea became part of Ukraine, the peninsula has remained the main port for Russia’s Black Sea fleet and has many other Russian institutions in the city such as a branch of Moscow State University and Dom Moscow, which is funded by Moscow taxpayers.

The city is of crucial importance to the Kremlin as it is Moscow’s only major all-season naval base in the south, which they used to access the Mediterranean Sea where Russia has a small but strategically important naval facility in Syria. Another emotional tie is that it was declared one of the Soviet Union’s 12 hero cities for withstanding a long Nazi siege before falling during the Second World War.

“Crimea has ended up in the middle of a quarrel between Ukraine and Russia and we will defend Crimea,” said a Tatar at the demonstration in Simferopol who would only give his name as Edem. “Our problems are not with Russians but with Russia’s politics and its leader, Putin. He sees the loss of Ukraine as a serious event because it could lead to more trouble between Russia and its neighbours.”

Like many Tatars from the Crimea, Edem invoked his families bitter memories of the Soviet deportations, when almost the entire Tatar population was deported for several decades to Central Asia.

“Russia did this to us, so why would we ever want to remain with them,” the furniture maker said.

“We Russians in Crimea love this place and we have been here for decades and centuries,” the former Soviet army officer said. “I hate what they did in Kyiv. I want to be part of Russia and I want that today because we are brothers from the same nation.”

“Crimea is not Russia,” was one of many chants that the Tatars screamed before their assault on the parliament. The echo from protesters loyal to Moscow was “the Crimea is Russian” or simply “Ross-i-ya.”

Given the proximity of the two sides in Simferopol and the incendiary rhetoric they hurled at each other, it was extraordinary that they did not end up in a far more vicious free-for-all. From morning to nearly nightfall thousand of Tatars and thousands of Russians pushed uneasily against each other jeering, chanting and whistling while waiving Ukrainian, Tatar, Crimean and Russian flags in front of the autonomous republic’s headquarters. Only a thin line of police kept the two sides apart.

About 60 per cent of those who live in the Crimea are Russian. Ukrainians, many of them strongly Russified, make up about 25 per cent of the population. The 240,000 Tatars make up the remaining 15 per cent of the population.

“The Russian forces are here in Crimea to protect the Russians, or so they say,” said Elzara Abdaramanova. “They have forgotten that we are the original people here and we must have a say. And what we say is that it is very dangerous for us to have Russian forces here.

“The real reason a lot of the Russians here support Moscow is because they are dependent on them for jobs associated with the military.”

One of the most unlikely protesters and one of the few who actually remembered the deportations was 78-year- old Gulsa Mamedovna Samidinova. Speaking in a mix of Tatar and Russian, the tiny woman said she blamed “politics” for the near riot.

“That Vladimir Putin is the one to blame for what is happening here today,” Samidinova said. “I would like to say more to you but I can’t.”

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